Roman Catholicism

Roman Catholicism: Lecture II

ROMAN CATHOLICISM

LECTURE II

Dornach, June 3, 1920

My Dear Friends,

It is my intention today to continue with the subject we began here
last Sunday, and I should like first to go back to the few words I
then said concerning the Anti-Modernist Oath. I described its nature
by saying that since the time of its inauguration anyone who holds a
teaching office in the Roman Catholic Church, whether as theologian
or preacher, has to take this oath which forbids anyone engaged in
Catholic teaching to deviate from what is recognized as dogmatic
truth by the Roman Catholic Church; which means, in fact, what is
recognized as dogma by the Roman Curia.

Now in face of such a fact the important question to ask oneself is:
“What is there actually new about this Anti-Modernist Oath?”

There is nothing new in the adherence of a Catholic preacher or
theologian to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church; please be
clear about that. What is new is that the person concerned has to
take an oath as to what is the doctrine of the Church. I want you to
be clear about this first, and then to see it in relation to the fact
that there has been a prodigious piling up of historical deeds in the
Roman Catholic Church during the last half century. It began with the
definition of
the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception;
then came a further extraordinary, subtle, and clever step in the Encyclical
and Syllabus of the sixties, in which Pope Pius IX in his eighty Articles
declared all modern thinking to be heretical. Then on top of that
came the definition of
the Dogma of Infallibility,
again a very important and extraordinarily clever and subtle advance. The
next extremely logical step was the Encyclical “Acterni Patris,”
which declared the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas to be the official
doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. The crowning of this whole
structure for the time being is this oath against Modernism, which in
effect is nothing else than the carrying over of something which was
always present intellectually into the sphere of human emotion, the
sphere of will and feeling. That which always had to be acknowledged
has, since the year 1907, had also to be sworn on oath.

Anyone who understands this grandiose dramatic development will
certainly not underestimate its importance, for it demonstrates the
only wakeful consciousness within our sleeping civilization. I should
be interested to know how many people felt as if stung by a viper
when they read a certain sentence in the last number of the “Basler
Vorwarts,” which illuminates as by a flash of lightning the
whole situation at the present time. I should really like to know how
many people, when reading this, felt as if stung by a viper! The
sentence runs: “Religion, which represents a fantastic reflex
in the minds of human beings concerning their relations one to
another and to nature, is doomed to natural decay through the
victorious growth of the scientific, clear and naturalistic grasp of
reality which is bound to develop parallel with the establishment of
a planned society.” This sentence is to be found in an article
which has not yet appeared in its entirety, but has yet to be
concluded. It is to be found in an article on the measures taken by
Lenin and Trotsky against the Russian Catholic Church and the Russian
religious communities in general. This article is at the same time an
indication of what is regarded as the programme for the future in
these quarters.

One knows for a certainty that the number of Lenin’s opponents
who feel as if stung by a viper on reading such a sentence is very
small. I want to emphasize this as not being without significance,
because it brings out to what an extent modern humanity passes
lightly over things, usually asleep — how it passes over the
weightiest facts, facts which are decisive for the life of mankind on
this earth. It is, of course, not a question of any one such
sentence; the point is that in certain quarters they will see to it
that the content of what is there expressed will be made known
throughout the world, that among the widest circles of the European
population an outlook will come about which can be thus expressed:
“Religion which represents a fantastic reflex in the minds of
human beings concerning their relations to one another and to nature,
is doomed to natural decay.” The so-called ‘enlightened’
humanity of today is still soundly asleep to the fact that such a
view is coming. But the Roman Catholic Church is awake; she alone in
fact is awake and is working systematically against the approaching
storm. She works against it in her own way. And it is very important
that we should understand that way, for I have had much to say about
the attacks from that quarter that are being forged against what we
have to stand for. Meanwhile the clouds are gathering. The latest is
that the bill posters had to notify us that the man who this morning
was to have posted up in Reinach the announcement of Saturday’s
lecture had the posters taken from him and burnt. You see, these
things are getting worse, even here they are getting systematically
worse.

What was written by a man who frequently hides behind the bushes and
calls himself ‘Spectator’ — a pack of sheer lies, I
told you last time about the most egregious of them — now goes
through the whole Roman Catholic press, and this burning of our
posters really takes one back out of modern times altogether.

Now, my dear friends, I have already raised the important question as
to why the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church today must take an
oath in support of what they were already pledged to maintain. No one
will deny that the enforcement of such an oath strengthens the
external grasp of the matter. Nor will anyone deny that if it is felt
necessary to make people take this oath, the assumption is that
without such an oath they would no longer go so firmly forward. But,
my dear friends, there is, of course, still a third point, which it
would be well for you to ponder. For verily things enter in here
which must not yet be called by their right names; yet the question
may nevertheless be thrown out as an aside. Must not confidence in a
thing be already to a certain extent shattered if it has to be sworn
on oath? Is it a possibility to administer an oath for the truth? Can
there be such a possibility? Is it not necessary to assume that the
truth of its own inherent force is its own guarantee in the human
soul? Perhaps it is not so important to ask whether an oath is moral
or good or useful; perhaps it is far more important historically to
ask whether it has become necessary, and if so, why?

In face of this oath something else is now necessary. It is necessary
that a certain number of human beings should feel how without
spiritual science there must inevitably come over Europe the
consequence of the frame of mind expressed in the words “Religion,
which represents a fantastic reflex in the minds of human beings
concerning their relations to one another and to nature, is doomed to
natural decay through the victorious growth of the scientific, clear
and naturalistic grasp of reality, which is bound to develop parallel
with the establishment of a planned society.”

What is it that is to bring about the decay of the old religions one
and all? It is all that has arisen during the last three to four
centuries as modern science, enlightened science — all that is
taught as objective science in the educational institutions of
civilized humanity. Bourgeois teaching and bourgeois methods of
administration have been adopted by the proletariat. What the
teachers of the universities and high schools right down to the
elementary schools have put into the souls of men, comes out through
Lenin and Trotsky. They bring out nothing but what is already taught
in the institutions of civilized humanity.

My dear friends, today there exists an antithesis which one should
contemplate without prejudice. It is this. What is to be done to
prevent the influence of Lenin and Trotsky from spreading over the
entire civilized world? The primary necessity is no longer to allow
our children and our youth to be taught what has been taught right up
to the Twentieth Century in our universities and in our secondary and
elementary schools. To grasp this seeming contradiction demands
courage, and because men do not want to have this courage, they go to
sleep. That is why one has to say that whoever reads a declaration
such as the one I have just quoted, even if it only appears in a few
lines of an article, should feel as if stung by a viper; for it is as
if the whole situation of present-day civilization were illumined by
a flash of lightning.

Face to face with this situation, what would spiritual science with
all its detailed concreteness have? What spiritual science would
have, I would characterize somewhat as follows. The Roman Catholic
Church, as a mighty corporation, represents the last withered remains
of the civilization of the fourth post-Atlantean Epoch. It can be
well authenticated in all detail that the Roman Catholic Church
represents the last remnant of what was the right civilization for
the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, what was justified right up to the
middle of the Fifteenth Century, but what has now become a shadow. Of
course products of a later evolution often herald their arrival in an
earlier period, and its earlier products linger on into a later
epoch; but in essentials the Roman Catholic Church represents what
was justifiable for Europe and its colonies up to the middle of the
Fifteenth Century.

Spiritual science, however, as we understand it, has to further the
needs of the fifth post-Atlantean civilization. The Roman Catholic
Church represents in a number of dogmas, as a self-contained
structure which is dead, but which still exists as a corpse,
something which hangs together inwardly through a well-constructed
logic, a logic of reality. In this structure there is spirit, the
spirit of a past epoch, but it is spirit. The way in which spirit is
contained within it I have, I think, shown in the lectures I held
here on St. Thomas Aquinas. There was spirit in these teachings, in
these dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, a spirit which had been
perceived by those great ones whose last stragglers we find in
Plotinus, and others, and with which St. Augustine had yet in an
interesting way to wrestle.

Since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, what has appeared as
philosophy, science, public opinion, world conception, apart from the
Roman Catholic Church, is, for the most part, void of spirit. For the
spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age begins only to emerge with
such principles as those of Lessing and Goethe. And it wants to enter
into what the natural-scientific trend inaugurated by Copernicus,
Galilee and Kepler was able to yield without spirit, and out of which
Darwin, Huxley, and so on have blown the last remnant of Spirit. It
wants to enter into that and fill it with Spirit. And spiritual
science wishes to make manifest the Spirit which has to be the spirit
of the fifth post-Atlantean age.

An institution permeated by a certain spirit as its own soul, if it
is to maintain itself as an institution, can only fight for the past.
To demand of the Catholic Church that it should fight for the future
would be folly, for an institution which carried the spirit of the
fourth post-Atlantean epoch cannot possibly carry that of the fifth.
What the Catholic Church has become, what has spread over the
civilized world as the configuration of the Catholic Church, and has
its other aspect in Roman law and the abstractness of the whole Latin
culture, all that belongs to the fourth cultural epoch. And the
Catholic Church configuration has permeated the entire of
civilization far more than men think. The monarchies, even if they
were Protestant ones, were in their structure at bottom Latin
Catholic institutions. For the fourth epoch it was necessary that men
should be organized according to abstract principles, and that
certain hierarchical ordinances should form the basis of
organization. But what is to come as the spirit of the fifth
post-Atlantean age, which we seek to cultivate through spiritual
science, does not require such a firm structure, does not need a
structure organized according to abstract principles, but requires
such a relation of one human being to another as is characterized in my
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
as ethical individualism. What that book has to say on the subject of
ethics stands in the same contrast to the social structure fostered by
the Roman Catholic Church as in the last resort spiritual science stands
to Roman Catholic theology.

Spiritual Science was verily never meant to appear in the role of
belligerent; spiritual science was only meant to state what it saw to
be the truth. Anyone who examines our activities here will have to
admit that never, never have I taken an aggressive stance. Of course, one
has had constantly to defend oneself against attacks which came from
outside, and that is the essential thing. But it is simply a demand
of the age that what spiritual science has to give should be
stated quite concretely. One has to remember that modern civilization
is asleep, and that Rome is awake. That Rome is awake is revealed by
the mighty drama unrolled in the definition of the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception; in the publication of the Encyclical of 1864,
with its Syllabus condemning eighty modern truths; in the declaration
of the Infallibility of the Pope; in the naming of Thomas Aquinas as
the official philosopher of the Catholic priesthood; and finally in
the anti-Modernist Oath for the teaching clergy.

In face of the rising tide of Darwinism, in face of the rising tide
of naturalism in the fifties, something was done which, although it
can only be understood out of the spiritual demands of the fourth
post-Atlantean epoch nevertheless throws down the gauntlet before all
this rising materialism. The rest of the world lets it come, or at
best counters it with foolish arguments such as those of Eucken.
Rome, however, sets up the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which
states clearly: “Naturally, no one can accept the Immaculate
Conception and at the same time ascribe to Darwinism; thus we
establish the incompatibility of the two things.” Not more than
a decade later, the whole structure of the modern world conception,
void of spirit, is condemned by the Syllabus. The definition of the
dogma of the Immaculate Conception was already a departure from all
the earlier traditional development of the Catholic Church. In what
then in former times consisted definition by an Ecumenical Council?
Within the Catholic Church a fundamental condition for the definition
of any dogma — I am simply relating, not criticizing —
was that the Fathers gathered together in the Council in which the
dogma was to be defined should be illumined by the Holy Spirit; so
that in reality the originator of the dogma is the Holy Spirit. It is
really a question of recognizing whether the Holy Ghost is really the
inspirer of the dogma to be defined. How does one know, how did they
know that? Because what was about to be defined as a dogma by an
Ecumenical Council was already the opinion of the whole Catholic
Church. Now that was not the case with the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception; consequently, one of the fundamental principles of the
Catholic Church was broken, the principle which required that a
doctrine shall only be made into a dogma if the faithful have
previously signified an inclination towards it. Of course, as regards
these modern definitions of dogma, one was already living in the
events of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch; and it was no longer so
easy as in the Middle Ages so to prepare the faithful that a common
opinion prevailed among them which could then be defined. But you
see, the ground had been well prepared — preparations had
really been going on all through the last three or four centuries for
these latest revelations; that is to say, these last revelations so
far. Even then the Roman Catholic Church was already awake; and if
you remember when the Jesuit Order was founded, you will easily draw
the inference that the foundation of that Order is essentially
connected with the fact that some means had to be found to overcome
the difficulties of working on the faithful in modern times and
generally to take these difficulties into account. One ought to pay
attention to the course things have taken. I am only relating, I am
not criticizing. 1574 was the year in which the citizens of Lucerne
themselves expressed a desire for Jesuitism. Let me repeat that it
was Canisius, the immediate disciple of Ignatius Loyola, who founded
the Jesuit College in Freiburg in 1580 which later established its
colony in Solothurn. I should like too, to say that after the
suppression of the Jesuit Order by Clement XIV, the Jesuits had, of
course, to disappear from Switzerland, and they then continued their
activities only in the countries of Frederick II of Prussia and of
Catherine of Russia, to whom the Jesuit Order really owes its
continued existence.

But in this extraordinary interregnum between the suppression of the
Jesuit Order in 1773 by Clement XIV and its reinstatement by Pius VII
in 1814, strange things nevertheless happened. For you see, during
this interval, in Sion, for example, the institution which had been
conducted by the Jesuits naturally remained; and as a matter of fact
for the most part, too, the same teachers remained in it; only up to
1773 these teachers were Jesuits, and from that date onward they were
no longer Jesuits, but one spoke of the Fathers of the Faith as
teaching in such institutions. Therefore, it is not surprising that
after Pius VII had in 1814 withdrawn the decree of Clement XIV, these
Jesuit colonies were again reinstated — in Brigue the same
year, in Freiberg in 1818, in Schwiez in 1836.

It is not my task to criticize these things, but I want you to know
about them, and I should further like to say this. From my
explanations you will have seen that from the 21st of
July, 1773, when Clement XIV issued the Bull “Dominus ac
Redemptor Noster” until Pius VII caused his Bull “Solicitude
omnium Ecclesiarum” to appear, the Jesuit Order was officially
suppressed. Now comes something extraordinary. There exist memoirs
written by a man who was called
Cordara,
a Jesuit, one who had gone
through all the grades of the Jesuit Order. From his memoirs it is
evident that he was not an ignoramus like Count Hoensbruch, whose
speeches and writings are unimportant, for, of course, the Jesuits
are clever and Hoensbruch is very foolish. It is a question of not
being asleep over these things today, but of knowing how to
distinguish the important from the unimportant. I should like to
mention one point in Cordara’s memoirs, where he remarks that
it was strange that the Jesuit Order should have been suppressed by
Pope Clement XIV, who had a great liking for the Jesuits and was at
the same time an extremely tolerant man and no fool. Thus Cordara
gives Pope Clement an excellent character, almost lauds him to the
skies, in spite of the fact that he suppressed the Jesuits.
Therefore, Cordara naturally asks how it was that they had to be
suppressed by this kindly Pope. “One must ask,” says
Cordara, “What were the intentions of Divine Wisdom in the
suppression of the Jesuits and why it was permitted?” Now, of
course, Cordara was a Jesuit, but a man who had even been taught by
them to think logically, and therefore, he does not ask abstract
questions but very concrete ones. He said, “We have to look for
what was blameworthy in the Order,” and he goes on to say, “I
find that as regards morality, the Jesuit Order has gone admirably to
work; as to unchastity or the like, we are very strict, nobody can
deny it. But we are very lenient towards everything of the nature of
slander, calumny, and abuse.” Cordara actually says that God
probably allowed the suppression of the Jesuit Order by Pope Clement
XIV because there had gradually crept into the Order a certain
tendency to slander, calumny, and abuse. Now I am not criticizing
this, I am only relating facts. I should only like to add that the
Jesuit Cordara further says: “One of our chief faults is pride,
which causes us to regard all other Orders as of no account and
worthless, and all secular clergy as worthless.”

Now, if one puts together everything in these memoirs which is said,
not as a reproach to the Jesuit Order but simply as a kind of mea
culpa, as an examination of conscience by a Jesuit, one finds in the
first place striving for political power; second — pride,
arrogance; third — contempt of other Orders and secular
priests; fourth — accumulation of wealth. But if one gradually
comes to know what it means to maintain dead, withered truths by
means of power, one cannot do better than to use such an Order to
provide for their maintenance. The Roman Catholic Church in Pius VII
well knew what it was doing. It discharged its debt of gratitude to
world history, history made by Frederick II, King of Prussia, and by
Catherine of Russia, both now dead, when it reinstated the Jesuit
Order. And among the first ‘foreign’ Jesuits to teach
here in Switzerland again were many of those who had been protected
by Catherine, many who came back from Russia. You can read all this
in the relevant historical documents.

You can see, therefore, that Rome was wide awake and made in advance
her necessary preparations. Wide awake preparation was made. Now
comes the next step, the condemnation of all that mounting tide of
science — ripe for condemnation since after four centuries of
effort to drive out the spirit, it remained void of spirit and
mankind remained asleep. The next step was the Encyclical of 1864
with its Syllabus. If the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception had already been a break with all earlier custom of the
Roman Catholic Church, undoubtedly what was promulgated in the
doctrine of Infallibility constituted a far greater break. For all
the acumen of the practiced logic of the Catholic Church was needed
to justify the contention that the Pope is infallible after Pope
Clement XIV in 1773 had suppressed the Jesuit Order, and his
successor Pope Pius VII in 1814 had reinstated it. A goodly number of
such things could be adduced. But the logic which had been so well
cultivated was not applied to produce sharply defined concepts. What
was needed was a well-formed concept which could justify
infallibility. Not what the Pope expresses as his private opinion is
regarded as infallible, only what he says ‘ex cathedra’.
Then it was not necessary to decide whether Clement XIV or Pius VII
was infallible, but whether Clement XIV or Pius VII had spoken ‘ex
cathedra’ or privately. Clement XIV must have spoken privately
when he suppressed the Jesuit Order, and Pius VII ‘ex cathedra’
when he reinstated it! But, you see, the trouble is that the Pope
never states whether he is speaking ‘ex cathedra’ or
privately. That he has never yet said! One must admit that it is
difficult to distinguish in the individual instance whether it is
subject to the dogma of infallibility, but the dogma is there, and
with it a good blow was struck at what can arise as the elemental
culture of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. It then became necessary
to draw the consequences and that was well done by Pope Leo XIII, a
man full of insight and of very great intelligence. Pope Leo XIII
sought to adopt the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as it was in the
fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The Church needed that philosophy which
is so great but great for the last culture epoch, for, of course,
objectively everything in the way of philosophy which has
subsequently arisen is small compared to what blossomed as Philosophy
in Scholasticism. But what is small is still a beginning, whereas
what was in Scholasticism was an end, a climax.

Now we must remember that mankind is nevertheless trying to progress
and therefore it happened that, both in the sphere of
natural-scientific research and in historical research, strange
vagaries cropped up among the Catholic clergy. Very well then, it now
became necessary to adopt strong measures in support of the Catholic
doctrine derived from St. Augustine. Hence the Oath against
Modernism.

Now of course, my dear friends, nothing can be said against all that,
if it is pursued by any community out of a free impulse, but when in
1867 the Jesuits were again allowed into Munich, a Jesuit priest in
his first sermon then said that the Rules of the Order forbade
Jesuits to meddle in politics, that a Jesuit never has taken any part
in politics; then it appears to me that modern men are not likely to
believe that. And it soon becomes otherwise. Up to that time it had
not in fact been possible to find a really adequate measure.

My dear friends, what I am really trying to bring home to you is that
all those who seriously want knowledge, progress and the good of
humanity will have to recognize the threefold nature of the social
organism. For how little political measures avail against the Roman
Catholic Church has shown itself in the course of the German ‘Kultur’
campaign. But what I am primarily trying to bring home to you is how
slow people are to see what, as the necessary consequence of
spiritual-scientific endeavor, must come into the world as the
impulse for the threefold order of society. That is what we need, a
wide awake understanding for the phenomena of the time.

Now, my dear friends, I have plunged into a theme into which I would
certainly not have entered had it not been for recent events here, of
which we shall see further developments. You know that on Saturday I
am to give a public lecture on “The Truth about Anthroposophy
and its Defense against Untruth.” But in any case I must
contrive next Sunday to continue the comments which I cannot complete
today. So next Sunday at half-past seven we will meet here once more,
although we have to start on a journey on Monday. In these troubled
times one cannot do otherwise, and so on Saturday, despite the
burning of our posters, the public lecture also will take place here.